Add baby and stir
The baby's room is pretty much done, barring some painting touchup. In all, this room ended up being the most complicated renovation project I've ever been involved in. The plan was to make the second-floor kitchen into the baby's room, and the project itself has been going on since last August, off and on.
(Here's our starting point, on (I think) our second visit to the house in April of last year before making an offer: Other pictures from that day here: )
We:
Ripped out, dismantled and dumpstered the original kitchen cabinets.
Left the (now unsupported) sink shut off with the shutoff valves and left it overnight; came back the next morning (we were still living at the Melita house) to find that the shutoff valves were unreliable, and there was a minor flood in the front hallway which had wrecked the ceiling in the front hallway, which we then ripped down.
This turned out not to matter (it became clear later that we would have had to rip it out anyway, for other reasons) but it was a complication at the time.
Had gas fitters in to disconnect the gas connection to the kitchen stove; had plumbers at the house on another job disconnect the water pressure.
Removed the original refrigerator and stove, lowering them down the front stairs with rope. We Dumpstered the stove, had Heavy Pickup take the fridge. (In all, we got rid of three stoves and three fridges that summer.)
Removed the gas and water pipes down through the floor and down through the front hall closet below.
Stripped the floor down through layers of 1) porcelain tile 2) linoleum 3) 1/4in plywood under the linoleum, then ripped up endless nails from the nice, but rather abused hardwood floor. This exposed the ragged hole in the floor and subfloor where the plumbing and gas had been connected, a complication which would haunt us for months. It also exposed some water-damaged floorboards in the southwest corner (not from our flood, but from an earlier one.)
Electrician replaced the ceiling light, switches, wires and plugs as part of the knob-and-tube replacement project.
Repaired the sagging floorboards from below, more or less, by bracing the subfloor with plywood. This did no harm, but less good than I hoped, because it still left a space the thickness of the original subfloor which attempts at patching didn't solve.
At around this point, the floor refinishers refused to refinish in the room, because the part of the floor that was wrecked by the pipes was insecure. This turned out to be a blessing in the long run.
Repaired the sagging plaster on the ceiling with plaster washers, using the lesson of the dining room ceiling (only hitting a stud or joist is useful; putting the screw into lath does you no good. Laths are soft and brittle, and the screw quickly strips. Instructions for using plaster washers generally don't tell you this.)
Began a project to put noise insulation on the party wall and thermal insulation on the outside walls:
Removed and denailed most of the baseboards.
Built a stud wall half an inch or so out from the party wall. This wall was filthy and full of cracks and holes, so in some ways it was nicer to just wall it up and start fresh.
Foamed in the gap between the old wall and the new studs, to deaden vibration.
Insulated with sound insulation.
Built a stud wall against the largest of the exterior walls.
Drywalled all the new walls (thanks, D.)
Stripped out the lath and plaster on the three exterior wall surfaces and insulated. Also insulated the bay window spaces that I could reach.
Repaired the sagging plaster on the east (interior) wall with plaster washers, and replaced missing plaster with 3/8 drywall.
After all this insulation, the room felt much warmer. I had stood in it during a blustery November storm and felt the cold wind gust on my face a second or so after it hit the west face of the house, but no more.
All this time, we were trying to figure out what to do for a door – in its phase as an apartment kitchen, the room hadn't had a door, though it obviously had had one originally. The replacement had to be the correct size (obviously) and also match the other doors on the second floor. We hoped to find the original in the door library we inherited in the garage, but no luck there. (blog post here.)
I thought that finding one would be easier than it was, since the houses in this neighbourhood were all built from identical mass-produced components, and we imagined that a few from our pattern had to have made their way into the antique house parts market. Actually, I couldn't get rid of the idea that we'd find the actual door in a store on Queen St., but no.
The Leslieville antique stores, the Door Store and Legacy Building Supplies in Cobourg all came up dry (despite a close call at the Door Store, involving much agonizing with a measuring tape), so we ended up just using the door from the study next door, which was more or less the same size. Neither the door nor the door frame space are perfectly rectangular, but it worked after some adjustment of the door frame.
After Christmas, it was time to grapple with the floor issues. This began with ripping out the subfloor much more ruthlessly than I'd tried to do before, and replacing it with ply properly secured to the joists. In the process, I sacrificed the blade of the new plate joiner, needing some way of making deep cuts straight down in a restricted area, but it seems worth it in retrospect. I found another one for $16 or so on Ebay.
I exposed one of the unsolved issues with that room, which is that because the bay window sticks out from the insulated space of the house, the base of it is exposed to the porch roof – it meets open air, and there's really no way of insulating it properly without getting under the porch roof itself, a task I'm not looking forward to. For the moment, the last ten inches or so of floor are cold.
D. had found some floorboards from the same period as our house walled up in their kitchen ceiling, which he gave to us, and I cut some more from maple boards from Home Depot. The result looked kind of rough at first, but I was relieved when it came up well after the floor refinishers came back and did the floor. It will always look patched, but tactfully patched, I think.
The window in the room was replaced along with most of the windows in the house.
The cast-iron duct cover was taken off and repainted.
All of this reworking of wall thicknesses meant that the baseboards were now the wrong lengths – some too short, some too long. Awkward math and carpentry followed – there was just enough board material between the ones that had come out and one that I found in the garage, but not much to spare. Other problems were that the walls aren't perfectly square, or, in some cases, perfectly vertical. I did fine until the last cut, when I cut a board at the wrong 45-degree angle, losing the coin toss and making the unforgiving error where you cut too much material instead of not quite enough. (I think I was tired and overconfident. )
I then followed up that mistake by making the correction on the wrong work piece, creating a new problem. Anyway, there are now two patches in the baseboards, which aren't undectectable, but don't draw attention to themselves, either.
I enjoy carpentry, but in some ways it plays to some of my weaknesses – math and three-dimensional visualization, for a start.
This project, however, finally taught me how to do quarter-round efficiently (the book will be called Quarter-round Without Tears): paint the uncut pieces in advance; bring the miter saw to the work site, not the work piece to the miter saw, eliminating the need for page after page of measurements and diagrams; and bang them into place on the spot with a power nailer (borrowed from D.; thanks again).
This month, we painted: the trim white, the walls a buttery light yellow (Behr's kitchen/bathroom paint, anticipating future messes). The window sashes were fussy to get right, as they always are, and the dark varnished wood needed generous amounts of paint, but it's more or less done.
Posted by Patrick at February 20, 2006 01:47 PM
